The big battle will come next week, as the bastards Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton will duke it out for Winterfell. This week’s potential battle in Riverrun turned out to be no battle at all. And speaking of no battle at all, King Tommen outlawing trial-by-combat is a bit disappointing but perhaps a bit of a relief for those of us still suffering from PTSD after seeing Oberyn Martell’s head exploded by The Mountain. But tonight’s most definitive moment was Arya reclaiming her Stark-ness.
As always, check out Alyssa Rosenberg’s review on Act Four. If there’s a Facebook Live episode at 2 p.m., it will be Alyssa on her own, but we will both be there to talk about the last two episodes.
No more No One, she is Arya Stark
There was probably a more direct, less painful, more logical and certainly less time-consuming path to rediscovering her commitment to family, but at least Arya Stark realizes that she is, in fact, Arya Stark and can be done with the Many-Faced God. And we can all be done with The Waif, whose mean mug will now be hung in the rafters of the Hall of Faces for eternity.
And this final act in Braavos actually played out in a pretty straightforward manner. After a week full of theories about Arya’s fate after getting stabbed by Waif — it was really Jaqen H’Ghar disguised as Arya who got stabbed, Waif was just a “Fight Club”-like self-illusion to Arya (uh, “Fight Club” spoiler alert, I guess?) — it turns out that Arya really did just get stabbed pretty good. Thankfully for her, Lady Crain, the kind actress whose life Arya saved finds her hiding in her dressing room and takes her back to her apartment to help heal. She fixes her up with some nasty soup but some crucial milk of the poppy, and Arya dozes off in seconds.
Lady Crain checks on her the next morning, and that’s the last thing she does because Waif is creeping in the apartment and kills her. Arya hears the disturbance and finds Waif standing over Crain’s body. “The Many-Faced God was promised a name,” Waif says. “Now he’s promised another name,” she adds. Arya knows that name is hers, so she leaps to the street from the apartment, setting off a very “Terminator 2”/”Matrix”-type chase through the streets of Braavos. Every time Arya thinks she puts a little daylight between herself and Waif, Waif is right back on her tail. Arya’s moving pretty well for someone about 24 hours removed from multiple stomach stab wounds, but she’s finally felled by some fruit. Well, more like she falls into some fruit, but she takes a tough tumble down a lot of stairs and the produce doesn’t exactly break her fall.
But she’s able to scamper to the tucked away, candle-lit room where she’s hidden her old sword, Needle, and to lure Waif there. Waif thinks this is going to be an easy kill — “It will all be over soon,” she tells Arya, but Arya has a trick up her sleeve. With Needle in hand, Arya slashes the candle, plunging the room into darkness. And it just so happens that she has plenty of experience in fighting without sight thanks to her blind spell earlier this season.
Back at the House of Black and White, Jaqen H’ghar is doing his usual somber shuffling around when he sees a trail of blood leading into the Hall of Faces. He follows it to find Waif (minus eyeballs) among the dead. Arya confronts Jaqen: “You told her to kill me.”
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